Most of you admitted to having low levels of political information - and admittedly some of the questions were a bit odd. The question about age distribution in Nigeria for example. But if you read anything about Africa - in comparison with the other nations - you should have been able to infer that it is a very young country. Lots of kids get born, and lots of older people die sooner than they should. That has a major impact on governance. Its doesn't bode well for stability.
You may have clicked on this on your own already, but the center summarizes the findings and provides a graphic with what questions the general public got right and what they got wrong:
They coupled this with a break down by age groups as well, so we can get an idea about what questions the 18-29 year old age group - which most of you belong to - got right, especially in comparison to older folks like me.
There were only three questions the youngest age group performed better on than the older generation. Those on the states with same-sex marriage, the age distribution in Nigeria, and Google Glass. The first and the last make some sense since they are at least indirectly related to hi-tech. I have no idea about Nigeria.
All groups blew the question on Dow Jones, which could be problematic. Even though the Dow is an imperfect measure of the state of the economy, it does tend to track how the economy has ebbed and flowed over the past few years. Not knowing which of the graphs was correct is the same as not knowing when the financial crash occurred and how the overall economy has fared since then.
We should revisit this topic from time to time over this semester. Is it significant that most people can only answer a handful of these questions correctly?
